Get ready for camera 3.0. Because next year, you might have to decide whether an 11-megaray sensor is enough for your new light-field camera.
Lytro, a Silicon Valley startup, today unveiled its radical new camera--also called the Lytro. With it, the company hopes to rewrite the rules with a technology called light-field photography, but the scale of the company's ambition is matched by the scale of its challenge.
On the outside, the Lytro looks different--a smooth, two-tone elongated box 4.4 inches long and 1.6 inches square. At one end is the lens and at the other is an LCD touch-screen display; along the sides are power and shutter buttons, a USB port, and a touch-sensitive strip to move the F2 lens through its 8X zoom range.
There are three models--the $399 cameras with "electric blue" and "graphite" exteriors whose 8GB of built-in memory is enough for about 350 shots and the "red hot," 16GB camera that can record 750 shots. They'll go on sale, through Lytro's Web site only, in the first quarter of 2012, Chief Executive Ren Ng told CNET in an interview today.
It's a striking industrial design for those accustomed to cameras festooned with buttons, protruding lenses, scroll wheels, and knobs. But the biggest differences are on the inside.
Conventional digital cameras use lenses to focus a subject so it's sharp on the image sensor. That means that for an in-focus part of the image, light from only one direction reaches the sensor. For light-field photography, though, light from multiple directions hits each patch of the sensor; the camera records this directional information, and after-the-shot computing converts it into something a human eye can understand.
The result is that a Lytro camera image is a 3D map of whatever was photographed, and that means people can literally decide what to focus on after they've taken the photo.
"Camera 1.0 was film. Camera 2.0 was digital," said Ng, who worked on the technology at Stanford University before founding Lytro, originally called Refocus Imaging, in 2006. "3.0 is a light-field camera that opens all these new possibilities for your picture taking."

Amidst all the hype-fest I don't hear anyone addressing whether this plenoptic camera avoids the huge resolution penalty other such designs have incurred. If not this is just another glitzy Silicon Valley marketing blitz for a cleverly packaged tech-toy that doesn't really do anything useful.

“The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth,” Ng says. “It’s taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you’re throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels. Light fields can use all that resolution, those megapixels, harness them, and drive them into the future.”

Other than being able to select focus after the fact, is there anything else special about this camera?

Being able to select focus after the fact, and/or being able to choose depth of field afterwards, is a huge technical leap. It is also able to do basic 3D based on the directional information of the light.